Pius
XII as Scapegoat

Michael Novak

From the
beginning of his papacy in 1939 until well after his death in 1958, Pope Pius
XII was honored with unfeigned warmth by Jewish leaders around the world. Golda
Meir was uncommonly effusive in her praise of him. Trees were planted in Israel
in his honor. In 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra flew to the Vatican to
give a special concert to show the nation’s gratitude. In 1940, Albert Einstein
wrote a tribute in Time. At his death, tributes were universal and
eloquent, especially by those Jewish groups closest to his efforts.

A later
generation, in contrast, has been exceedingly harsh. Why this stunning reversal?
Whose interests are served? As it turns out, the spectrum of those who benefit
by denigrating Pius XII is very broad.

The reversal
might be said to have begun in April 1945. The instant Hitler fell, the
propaganda machine of Stalinist communism turned full-bore on Pius XII, then on
the Catholic bishops and priests of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, and
Italy. The strategic aim was to prepare the way for Communist governments in the
Slavic and Latin countries of Catholic Europe. More than he had feared
Hitler—and with good reason, as events after 1989 demonstrated—Stalin feared the
moral power of the Pope.

The attack on
Pius XII took on major proportions, however, only in 1963, with Rolf Hochhuth’s
surprisingly successful play, The Deputy. Even though it was roundly
denounced by historians, the play drew moral attention away from Hitler and
moral pressure away from Germany, especially Protestant and pagan Germany, and
shifted the spotlight of moral condemnation in the direction of the Pope and the
Catholic Church.

Today, a
considerable number of “progressive” Catholics, not least among them former
priests and seminarians, choose to beat up on Pius XII as a way of diminishing
the papacy in general, and thus also the present Pope with whom they especially
disagree. This is the express intention of John Cornwell, author of Hitler’s
Pope: to discredit John Paul II and his ilk, that is, popes speaking as
solitary moral voices (which, though he does not seem to notice it, more or less
undercuts Cornwell’s case against the solitary moral voice of Pius XII). One can
only wish progressive Catholics better luck next pope, even if they have trouble
making up their minds about what they want in papal outspokenness.

A few Jewish
spokespersons today, both in America and elsewhere, have also turned on Pius
XII. For the first fifteen years or so after World War II, the effort to
comprehend the sheer barbarity, madness, and evil of Hitler and his entire
machinery of death ended in frustration. There followed many recriminations
among Jewish groups themselves, as chronicled in Walter Laqueur’s book The
Terrible Secret. The terrible secret is how long it took the public to
recognize that after January 1942 the Nazis were serious about exterminating
Jews. Many Jews fought and died in furious resistance, in vain. But most could
not believe what was happening to them until far too late.

Why, it was now
urgently insisted, didn’t someone warn them? Why didn’t someone sound the alarm?
Why didn’t at least one world leader raise a voice in moral condemnation and
say, “This must stop!”

Here, too,
refocusing the question on Pius XII brought moral relief. Journalists and
commentators of many different backgrounds (including Catholics), who had never
before thought that popes counted for much, now imagined that one word from the
Pope, one dramatic statement, might have had the necessary miraculous effects.

In fact, what
Pius XII did say and do—especially through Vatican Radio, jammed as it was in
Germany—was almost daily amplified by the BBC and other Allied radio
broadcasters. Reports of atrocities were easily dismissed as war propaganda, to
which the public had become inured during World War I. Appeals to Hitler would
have been even more futile: the Fuehrer knew he was violating Christian moral
principles; in his eyes Christianity was a religion for weaklings, and he had
contempt for it. Besides, when Pius XII had pleaded with every ounce of public
strength for one last peace conference in the summer of 1939, before an
irreversible descent into the cauldron of war, no one took him seriously. No one
even answered his summons, neither the Axis powers nor the Allies. That was the
last time he had freedom of access to worldwide media.

Once the war
began, Mussolini shut the Pope up in the Vatican, and every means of
communication he had was censored—his mail, Vatican Radio, L’Osservatore
Romano. Four different Nazi intelligence organizations, along with the more
pervasive Italian ones, penetrated the Vatican. (It was easy to threaten the
families of Vatican employees, virtually all of whom commuted into the Vatican
gates every working day.) The Holy See, moreover, was totally dependent on the
Italian government for essential services: water, sewage, electricity,
telephone, telegraph, and food. Even with all this, Hitler’s unhappiness with
Pius XII was such that he twice gave orders that contingency plans for occupying
the Vatican be put into operation. Paratroopers were to attack suddenly and haul
the Pope off to Germany. Twice his orders were frustrated by local commanders,
who delayed until he was distracted elsewhere. (One told him he was assembling
experts in Latin and Greek who could decide which of the archives to haul off,
and this would take six weeks.)

When the Pope
had full voice nobody listened. Are we to believe that when he could not be
heard unless his keepers let his words go forth, then the world would
have listened? For most Catholics, such reasoning is hard to understand. During
the last fifteen years, for instance, there has been no lack of dramatic
statements by Pope John Paul II (and Mother Teresa)—sometimes in the very face
of world leaders, and before vast audiences on international television—against
the systemic use of abortion and euthanasia and “the culture of death” they
represent. Few listen. Why would they have listened in 1942 or 1943?

The Allies were
interested in the Pope when he made propaganda for their side. They didn’t want
him criticizing Communist atrocities, since Stalin was an ally; they didn’t want
him condemning Allied carpet-bombing of German and Italian cities. But they did
want him to condemn the German carpet-bombings of London and Coventry. They were
furious when he was silent.

As prisoner in
the Vatican, Pius XII was silent about many things, and on principle, not out of
fear. Archbishop Sapieha of Krakow upbraided him publicly for not speaking up in
late 1939 and 1940 as the intellectual leaders of the Polish Church, lay and
clerical, were persecuted by the thousands, beaten, killed, thrown into
concentration camps. Sapieha later recognized that moving into open rhetorical
warfare would have been useless—and worse, positively inflammatory. He later
grasped the method in the Pope’s coolness and followed suit in his own style of
leadership as the years went by. He was young Karol Wojtyla’s protector and
teacher.

The
vulnerability and weakness of the papacy was nothing new. Among recent namesakes
of Pius XII, two (Pius VI and Pius VII) had been jostled in rude carts to Paris
for delicious humiliation by Napoleon; the chancellor of Pius IX had been
assassinated on the marble stairs of his office building, while the Pope had to
flee Rome for his life; Leo XIII was also driven into temporary exile in the
late nineteenth century. Pius XII knew this history and knew precisely the
Vatican’s vulnerabilities, but he told a boastful and threatening Goebbels to
his face that he personally feared nothing, and would never leave Rome. Often
described as distant and analytical, Pius also had cold steel in his spine.

A skilled reader
of men, Pius had carefully diagnosed both Hitler (given to flying into
destructive rages) and Mussolini (more reasonable and, even better, Italian).
The Pope knew that on at least a few big things he could eventually persuade
Mussolini—keeping Rome a free city, for instance—but he also knew he had been
thrown into a game of wits with Hitler, in which an iron determination not to be
baited out of formal neutrality might prevail against all odds. No matter how
bleak everything appeared from 1939 to 1943, Pius XII judged that coolness under
fire would allow him to shepherd such strengths as could be deployed to
alleviate suffering.

Many people
around the Pope begged him to speak out more dramatically—the ambassadors of
Britain, Brazil, and France, for instance, confined by necessities of war in
cramped rooms inside the Vatican walls. The Pope pointed out that he was
speaking out, very strongly, in clear and unmistakable principles. More
than once, he drew the portrait of the brutal jackboot of racism, unjustified
violence, and the gross slaughter of human beings. He did not, of course, point
out which powers the portrait described. To figure that out did not take
rocket science; the propagandists at BBC knew instantly how to put those papal
condemnations at Hitler’s feet, and did so within hours. Hitler’s infuriated
analysts saw just as quickly how the Pope intended his words to be used, but
(cleverly) without formally violating neutrality. Worse, if the Nazis attacked
what the Pope said, they confirmed the accuracy of the BBC’s sharp thrusts.

Among world
leaders, none was more at the mercy of surrounding Axis powers for the entire
period of the war than Pius XII. But none spoke as openly as he did or fed the
world press with as much vital information about what was happening. He also
saved a large number of Jewish lives through opening convents, monasteries, and
religious houses to clandestine sanctuary, and brought face-to-face,
hand-to-hand relief to millions who suffered as refugees. Pope Pius XII worked
out his strategy early, learned to adjust his tactics, and never heard a
convincing reason—though he heard many reasons—to do differently. He was as
steady and courageous as he was cool and analytical.

A less
disciplined course, Pius XII knew, might have led him to become more
confrontational. If that course resulted in an even more open and draconian
warfare on the Church, the very best, ablest, and bravest would have been killed
or imprisoned earliest. All would have been reduced to silent servility. The
Pope probably would have been spared, mocked for his helplessness, and reduced
to the isolated, almost demented state in which Napoleon left Pius VII. But
scores of thousands of others would die, with no tangible gain. Hitler was
yearning for the confrontation. Wiser heads trapped under Hitler’s power, with a
view to the future, were not.

For some
critics, all this is too subtle. They demand in retrospect an open,
no-holds-barred papal condemnation of unprecedented evil. They offer nothing but
speculation about what would have followed from such a statement. Indeed, for
the rigor of their logical position, they must concede to the papacy far greater
rhetorical power than modern theories of the advanced secularization of Europe
permit. Do such historians pledge that they, for instance, would heed the
solemn words of a pope today, even when those words go against their own beliefs
and interests? And if they wouldn’t today, why would others then?

The fury of
recent attacks on Pius XII, in contrast with the almost universal esteem he
enjoyed from the beginning of the war until his death, is fed by different
passions than those of sixty years ago. Among those secular Jews whose chief
organizing principle is the Holocaust, one hears the simultaneous assertion that
all theological notions are abstruse and fanciful, and yet that a theological
condemnation of the Holocaust by Pius XII would have made a difference. Others
today who are bitterly opposed to the Church’s perennial position against the
moral approval of homosexual acts, or against abortion or euthanasia, also seem
to delight in weakening the moral authority of the papacy. At the commanding
heights of culture, as the Marxists used to say, this new establishment resents
the imputation that what it blesses as moral is contrary to the law of God and
hence immoral. The critics of Pius XII are deflecting attention from themselves;
for this new establishment, it is convenient to discredit the messenger.

The more
antithetical the times to Catholic substance, the higher the prestige of the
papacy seems to climb. It appears to be an office most easily injured by
universal obeisance, and bravest and most useful when it runs against the grain.
Two thousand years on the same spot, above the tomb of Peter, it has seen many
powerful establishments rise and fall. Today’s charges against Pius XII cannot
stand scrutiny.

Michael Novak
holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the
American Enterprise Institute.